It feels a little weird to sit down and write a post after a little over a month on hiatus, but here I am, doing it. I’ve finally got version 7.0 of this Web site in a state where it’s practically ready to launched. If everything goes correctly, I will stick to the announcement I made a few days ago and release 7.0 to the public on Mon 03 Jan, just in time for everyone to get back to surfing their favorite blogs after New Year’s day.

In coming posts, I’ll talk more specifically about the changes I’ve made in version 7.0, but let me comment on them at a high-level here. Generally speaking, everything aside from the content is new or rebuilt. For someone trying to juggle a partnership at an insanely busy design studio and a private life with a girlfriend and a dog, it was a nontrivial undertaking. I’m actually shocked that I got it done!

Under the hood, I’ve upgraded to Movable Type 3.14, which provides a handful of new publishing conveniences, but not that many. I’m a little disappointed in how few improvements there are to this version of the software over 2.6, which I was using before, but there are at least a few security fixes that made it worthwhile for me to upgrade.

The most obvious change is the design, of course, which I already know some people just hate, but I’ve been tweaking it, refining it and living with it for about three months now, and I still quite like it. The design also reflects a complete reworking of the div structure and CSS: there are some obvious architectural similarities to the way the information was organized in version Six.5, but I took the time to rebuild everything from scratch, rethinking the way every single line of display code was written. The upshot of that is, if enough people are vocal about their objections to the new look and feel, I can dress it up to a more agreeable state fairly easily through the CSS. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that.